Roman Fever Symbolism

“Miss Strangeworth is a familiar fixture in a small town where everyone knows everyone else. Little do the townsfolk suspect, though, that the dignified old woman leads another, secret life…”. A secret life can be evil or good, in Miss Strangeworth’s case it is suitable, but do others appreciate this secret life. In The Possibility of Evil Shirley Jackson illustrates inner thinking, revealing action, and symbolism to show how Miss Strangeworth tends the people like her roses, but truly state's them evil. She uses symbolism to express how Miss Strangeworth compares the people like her roses but treats them differently in a cruel way.

Both Laurie Anderson’s motivational song “Beautiful Red Dress” and Carrie Underwood’s more uplifting song “Nobody ever told you” addresses positivity, yet each poet employs unique shifts in tone to achieve her respective purpose. Laurie Anderson portrays women as treated unfairly while Carrie Underwood motivates women to view themselves as confident and self-reliant. Anderson’s use of literary devices, anaphora, and imagery emphasize the neglection of women, and emphasizes the gender inequality which causes economic inequality. However, in contrast, Carrie Underwood’s use of literary devices, similes, and anaphora highlights the positivity of women. Through Anderson’s Song Beautiful Red Dress, she highlights in her lyrics “I’m at high tide”.

Describing Anne Sexton is no easy task but the word madwoman keep coming to mind. It’s essential to define what a madwomen means to have a better understanding of what it represents. The Cambridge dictionary defines madwoman as “a woman who behaves in a very strange and uncontrolled or dangerous way”. Anne Sexton perhaps is a madwoman but with her personal struggles in life comes beauty and depth to her poetry or as Charles Bukowski once said “She is mad but she is magic there is no lie in here fire”. Sophie Heawood also adds a different perspective to how we may mistake a women’s madness in “The older I get, the more I see how women are described as having gone mad, when what they have actually become is knowledgeable and powerful”.

Medieval Women Are Not What You Think They Are Women of the medieval times are not like women today, women in the medieval times were known to be cunning and manipulative. In the book “The Prologue” to Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, Chaucer gives us details about a Nun who is shown as manipulative and cunning and that it is also a trend for medieval women to be manipulative and cunning not only her. “The Prologue” is about how author Geoffrey Chaucer goes on a pilgrimage and takes note about the people that he views. On his pilgrimage there is a Nun who does things that nuns would not typically do such as wear red lipstick. Chaucer then continues to write about how she is not your typical nun and shows manipulative and cunning traits.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, the author of The Scarlet Letter, referred to the novel as a work of Romanticism. Hawthorne only describes it as Romanticism, but it also has Puritan ideals and beliefs in the novel itself. In novel, Hester, a young wife who committed adultery, was sentenced to a lifetime of cruelty, rejection, and sadness. Hester was required to wear the letter A on her chest to remind her of her sin and to remind others of what it would be like to commit a sin. Pearl, Hester’s daughter, was the only great thing that came from her sin, but Hester still saw Pearl as a sin and was afraid to consider Pearl a positive outcome because of the Puritan beliefs that she was surrounded by.

In the story of “Roman Fever” Edith Wharton introduces the reader to the main characters, Alida Slade and Grace Ansley. Through the story the reader is told that both were more acquaintances than friends, and that for several years they were next door neighbors. There is a flashback to their younger years when they lived in Rome, and secrets that were hidden are brought forth by the jealous Mrs. Slade. The story progresses and the irony is brought forth near the end, how Roman Fever is given as two meanings. The story takes place in Rome on top of a Roman restaurant overlooking the Palatine and the Forum, the reader gets a little humor from Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley’s daughters, Jenny and Barbara, as they run off into the night to “leave

Abate (169) acknowledged that, compared to other novels of similar theme, The Outsiders was “lack of true profanity, drug use, and sex acts.” Is it characteristically a touch of femininity that women writer produce when writing about violence? There were two female characters present in the story of the outsiders: Cherry Valance and Marcia who reveal certain stereotypes about femininity. First, Cherry embodies the woman as emphatic and anti-violent peace maker. She enjoyed long conversation she had with Ponyboy, a greaser, listened to him and showed empathy toward Ponyboy’s problematic life ( Hinton 30-34). Cherry is also portrayed as a smart girl of the upper class who is soft, educated, and is sick of fights.

The Scarlet Letter is about a woman named Hester Prynne who struggles with the weight of society after she commits adultery. Pearl, the daughter, does not fit into the Puritan society’s mold, and Mr Dimmesdale is struggling with guilt of not being able to reveal a great secret. One of the themes of this book is that something beautiful can come out of something bad. Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, and Pearl all represent the theme in their own ways. This theme means that if something bad happens, something good can come out of it, even if it takes a lot of time to happen.

She started in my mind as a fearsome figure, and ended as the same, but in between as she explained herself to Jane: Bertha was nothing more than a woman abandoned by her unnamed husband (Rochester). The figure and the lady was representational of the Two Faces seen by Bertha. The hardest part of writing the story was creating the emotions Jane was feeling. I worried adding too much emotion would be untrue to Jane’s character since she was often plain and controlled, with only moment of outbursts or profound disobedience. The way I overcame this difficulty was referring to the voice and emotions she exhibited during her time in the red room.

The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Orphanage, directed by J.A Bayona, are both female driven stories, and due to a lack of dominant female roles in books and television, these pieces are statements of our society. The 19th century had few feminine rights and strict gender roles. A time when a large population of women were thought to have a form of mental illness, and due to a lack of medical knowledge were vastly mistreated. The lapse in medicinal science, in combination with extremely sexist ideologies caused further harm to come to women than help. The Yellow Wallpaper, with a nameless female Narrator, depicts how women seen as unwell were treated in the 1900’s.

She even makes an allusion to Virginia Woolfe’s A Room of One’s Own, in which she discredits the homogeneity with which the mainstream feminists try to tackle women’s issues by saying “A room of one’s own may be necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time” (116). Not even established authors can escape the blunt reality with which Lorde writes. She blatantly declares that her female readers will never understand each other’s struggles: “Some problems we share as women, some we do not” (119). Some might ask then how can we work together if we do not share the same issues? It seems as if Lorde’s attempt to shed light on social inequalities has only allowed the oppressors to fall further into indifference.